It is the widest superscalar processor on the market, one that can issue up to 10 instructions and sustain 8 per clock: IBM’s POWER8. IBM’s POWER CPUs have always captured the imagination of the hardware enthusiast; it is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the M1 Abrams of the processor world. Still, despite a flood of benchmarks and reports, it is very hard to pinpoint how it compares to the best Intel CPUs in performance wise. We admit that our own first attempt did not fully demystify the POWER8 either, due to the fact that some immature LE Linux software components (OpenJDK, MySQL…) did not allow us to run our enterprise workloads.
Hence we’re undertaking another attempt to understand what the strengths and weaknesses are of Intel’s most potent challenger. And we have good reasons besides curiosity and geekiness: IBM has just recently launched the IBM S812LC, the most affordable IBM POWER based server ever. IBM advertises the S812LC with “Starting at $4,820”. That is pretty amazing if you consider that this is not some basic 1U server, but a high expandable 2U server with 32 (!) DIMM slots, 14 disk bays, 4 PCIe Gen 3 slots, and 2 redundant power supplies.
Classic AnandTech. This is only part 1 – more parts are to follow.
And maybe We will be able to buy it. Take a look to the Talos system:
https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php
Basically a complete Power8 system (board+cpu) for ~$3700
Most interesting POWER system since the PowerMac G5.
I’m wondering how portable the open source Radeon or Nvidia drivers are, and how much work it’d take to get them running.
Well, they have a demo of the Unreal Engine 4 running on it. So something is working.
Where at? I can’t find it
https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/op_ue4_gl.php
They just need to release Amiga OS4 for it
or MorphOS …
But thats not going to happen, because both only support 32-Bit PowerPC and not the 64-Bit POWER architecture.
And both can actually only use one core.
A port of AROS would be possible, especially the Linux-hosted flavor.
A native 64-Bit core for x86 also exists.
That’s so true
It’d be cool to have AmigaOS4 running on a POWER8 system though… I don’t care about SMP, even one P8 core is miles ahead any Amiga PPC system.
There are some efforts to make AROS use SMP – I was testing some alpha-versions, but it is all still very unstable.
I thing for an amigoid OS SMP is the wrong way to go. They would just need some type of hypervisor and run a new OS-instance for each core. With just a few hundred kilobytes in size that’s no big deal.
I agree: POWER would be great for all amigoid OSes. But MorphOS and Amiga OS4 are closed source and the devs will never join forces
And AROS has to few devs – always had…
Edited 2016-07-23 21:01 UTC
I wonder how much effort moving ppc32 code to ppc64 really needs… It can’t be that hard.
But the thing is… if AOS4 is ported to ppc64 there will be no reason to sell you super expensive AmigaOnes like X1000 or X5000… and I think that’s the main stopper to an AOS4 ppc64 port.
Spending 3k euros in a POWER8 system with bleeding edge technology makes much more sense than spending 3k euros in an X5000 with ancient PPC hardware. (I love AOS4, but I think ppc32 is a dead end).
Amiga is a dead end, so they might as well just focus on dead end HW just to make it all the more meta…
Well, haterism aside, Amiga is one of the few 100% alternative computer platforms still alive (and kicking). They are creating thing.s
I’m an AmigaOne and AOS4 user and I really love the platform. If MorphOS managed to port part of their OS to the ppc970 G5s… I think AOS4 can do it too.
In the end I think moving to ppc64 worth the effort cause POWER8 is here to stay, it’s a real viable platform and It’s way more advanced than X1000 o X5000… and the price is very similar.
Don’t get me wrong: I still love my Amiga and consider myself as a fan, but to say it is alive goes to far.
But it has managed not to die ether…
So it is now the first official zombie-system! 🙂